Friday, February 13, 2015

ISIS Claims Another American

Kayla Mueller, the young American activist kidnapped by Islamic State terrorists 18 months ago, is dead, probably after being murdered by her captors.

Mueller was abducted by Islamic State (a.k.a. ISIS or ISIL) as she left a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Aleppo, Syria and held by IS in its stronghold of Raqqa, Syria. A U.S. mission to liberate Mueller and other American hostages last year failed.

After bungling the rescue effort, President Obama now plans to use Mueller’s death to press Congress for more authority to pursue Islamic State. Whether Obama can be trusted to use any new authority or war materiel properly is an open question.

Obama described Islamic State as “a hateful and abhorrent terrorist group whose actions stand in stark contrast to the spirit of people like Kayla.”

Obama added, “On this day, we take comfort in the fact that the future belongs not to those who destroy, but rather to the irrepressible force of human goodness that Kayla Mueller shall forever represent.” [italics added]

Perhaps in an effort to save on speechwriting fees, Obama cut and paste from his awful 2012 speech to United Nations in which he bloviated that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

It’s not like Obama is serious about the threat that Islamism poses to Western civilization. When it comes to a U.S. hostage being killed by Islamists or French journalists being slaughtered for mocking Islam, Obama is phoning it in. His heart isn’t in it because he sides with the Muslims and shares many of their complaints about the United States.

The passing of the 26-year-old woman from Prescott, Ariz., was confirmed by her family days after the Islamic State claimed Mueller died in an airstrike against IS carried out by Jordan. The IS group provided no evidence to support its claim about the manner of Mueller’s death but reportedly informed the Muellers of their daughter’s demise by email.

Any claim of Jordanian complicity in Mueller’s death is very difficult to accept. It may be a psychological warfare tactic calculated to drive a wedge between Jordan and the U.S., traditionally close allies in the Global War on Terror. Jordan has been conducting bombing raids against IS targets after the group released a graphic, sickening video last week showing captured Jordanian pilot, Mouath al-Kasaesbeh, being burned alive in a cage. After the pilot was burned beyond recognition, a construction vehicle dropped rubble on his body to demonstrate the effects that Jordanian bombing runs have on targets.

The U.S. Department of Defense says Mueller’s passing didn’t happen the way the Islamic State organization describes. “We have no indication that there were civilian casualties as a result of those strikes or collateral damage,” said Rear Admiral John Kirby, press secretary at the Pentagon.

Other evidence strongly suggests Islamic State, which had been using Mueller as a political pawn, is lying.

Reuters reported on the weekend that the Islamic State imposed a “life sentence” on Mueller when she was captured. Activist Mauri Saalakhan, who runs a U.S.-based campaign to free a Pakistani woman whose case is a cause celebre among terrorists, said the sentence was imposed in retaliation for the U.S. jailing of the Pakistani.

In July terrorists informed Mueller’s family that she would be executed in 30 days if Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui were not released or if Mueller’s family refused to hand over a ransom of 5 million euros, or about $6.6 million, Saalakhan said.

Siddiqui, according to Reuters, is serving an 86-year sentence in a prison medical center in Texas. A jury convicted her in 2010 of trying to kill a group of FBI agents, U.S. soldiers, and interpreters who sought to question her about ties to al-Qaeda.

Mueller is believed to have been the last American hostage in Islamic State’s hands. IS hostages typically meet gruesome ends. In recent months IS has released videos showing the murders of three other Americans, two Britons, and two Japanese hostages. Islamic State militants have no reservations about killing women, even Muslim women, and are particularly enthusiastic about ending the lives of educated, professional women.

And given President Obama’s squishy approach to Islamic State and the rest of the Islamofascist terror complex worldwide, there will be many more such deaths in the future.

Terrorists aren’t scared of Obama the way they were of George W. Bush. This makes sense. Obama’s isn’t particularly worried about them, either.

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About Me

An award-winning investigative journalist, Matthew Vadum is senior editor at Capital Research Center. His work is cited by Fox News, Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and many other media outlets. He's been on "The O'Reilly Factor," "CBS Evening News," "The Daily Show," and "The Colbert Report," and denounced by Al Sharpton, Oliver Stone, Roseanne Barr, and Keith Olbermann. Michelle Malkin hailed Vadum for having "the foresight and insight to report on the [ACORN] story when nobody else would." Glenn Beck said he finally "got it" when Vadum appeared on his Fox TV show to talk about ACORN, helping him draw one of his famous tree diagrams. Vadum "writes some of the harder edged and more influential briefings" in the conservative movement (Washington Post) and is a “conservative data hound" (Washington Independent).
Vadum is also Adjunct Scholar at the James Madison Institute. His report galvanized opposition to liberals' campaign to force a kind of affirmative action onto private grant-makers in Florida. According to National Review, it convinced the Florida legislature in 2010 to pass SB0998 which outlawed the "ACORNization" of philanthropy in that state.